The present disclosure relates to a method of manufacturing resin particles, an apparatus for manufacturing resin particles, and an image forming apparatus.
In general, in an electrophotographic process, a surface of an electrostatic latent image carrier is charged by corona discharge, and then is exposed to a laser, thereby forming an electrostatic latent image. This electrostatic latent image is developed to form a toner image by toner, and the toner image is transferred to a recording medium. Thereby, a high-quality image is obtained. Typically, for the toner applied in this electrophotographic process, the toner of toner particles that have an average particle size of 5 to 10 μm and are obtained by mixing a coloring agent, a charge control agent, a release agent, a magnetic material, etc. with a binder resin such as a thermoplastic resin, kneading, pulverizing, and classifying the mixture are used. Then, for the purpose of giving fluidity to the toner, performing charge control on the toner, or improving a cleaning characteristic, inorganic fine powder of silica or titanium oxide is externally added to the toner.
With regard to this toner, due to a recent request for high quality in a formed image, reducing a particle size of the toner to improve a resolution has been considered. To output a high-quality image, it is useful to reduce an average particle size of the toner to about 5 μm and to sharpen particle size distribution of the toner.
Thus, there is a proposal for a method of manufacturing the toner using an emulsion polymerization aggregating method of adding an aggregating agent to a mixed dispersion obtained by mixing a resin particle dispersion, a pigment dispersion, and a release agent dispersion, which are previously prepared, to reduce the particle size of the toner to sharpen the particle size distribution of the toner, and heating the mixed dispersion to obtain aggregated particles that serve as toner. Further, another method of manufacturing the toner from a fine-particle dispersion in which fine particles of polyester resin containing a pigment and a release agent are dispersed using a fine-particle aggregating method is proposed.
According to each of the above methods, the toner having a desired particle size can be reliably obtained by adjusting manufacturing conditions. However, to obtain the toner having the desired particle size, it is necessary to delay a heating speed of the fine-particle dispersion, and the aggregation of the fine particles is advanced until the toner reaches the desired particle size. As such, there is a problem in that it takes a long time to obtain the toner.